A review of The Scarlet Lady. By Carol Everett.

Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1991.

Carol Everett was responsible for the deaths of 35,000 people. No, she wasn’t a Nazi. Nor was she a KGB agent. She was a successful career woman working in a legitimate Texas business. Carol Everett was an abortionist. And with Hitler and Stalin, the abortion industry is quickly becoming one of the greatest means of mass murder of the twentieth century.

The Scarlet Lady is the story of how Carol Everett rose in the abortion industry to become one of the most successful, most well paid, and most deadly abortionists in America. In the six years that she worked in the trade, she helped to kill 35,000 babies – 35,001 if you include her own abortion. It was only a conversion to Christianity which put a halt to this barbarism.

This book is the ghastly story of her career as an abortionist and her escape from it. The reading is so horrible at some points that it’s like reading about prison life as described in the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn. Yet this book is essential reading because it demolishes so many myths of the abortion industry. These myths are:

–Abortion is all about freedom of choice and control over one’s body. As Everett shows, the abortion industry is anything but about choice. Everett set up what she called Advisory Referral Centres which advertised sexual counseling and pregnancy tests – both free of charge. Of course, once in, women were steered in the direction of abortions.

The use of fear was often a good tactical weapon. Women who feared having their parents discover they were pregnant were especially susceptible to being sold on abortion. “I knew how to sell abortions – take the fear, amplify it, get their money, push them through.”

Staff were in the business of pushing abortions, not offering choice. One clinic assistant who showed a woman a book on fetal development was sacked. Says Everett: “Although Barbara was a good employee, if she could not sell abortions, she had to go.” (Italics added.)

–Legal abortion prevents back alley abortions and the risks they entail. Not only were deaths due to ‘back alley’ abortions relatively rare before the Roe v Wade decision, but that decision simply made all the illegal back alley abortions legal! Nothing changed. The same shoddy practitioners who were once outlawed were now legitimate, running their own clinics!

Dishonesty among doctors was as prevalent before Roe as after. Whenever Everett opened a new clinic, the doctors who did her abortions would simply steal the needed equipment from hospitals at which they worked. Falsification of medical reports and lying to pregnant women was also commonplace.

–Abortion is about helping women. Wrong. Abortion is about making money – big money. Greed, not love, is the motivating factor behind the abortion industry. At Everett’s clinics (she had several), an abortion for a woman eighteen weeks pregnant cost $375. At twenty weeks it cost $500. Her abortion clinics became abortion mills, working with assembly line efficiency. Operating seven days a week, she would oversee 400 abortions a month. She received a $25 commission for each abortion. Thus she was earning $10,000 a month. Her plans were to have five abortion clinics operating full-time in the Texas area, performing 600 abortions a month, earning her $15,000.

Abortion was definitely big business for Everett. She had ads in the Yellow Pages of five southern states, each with a toll-free number. Ads in newspapers offered coupons with 10 per cent discounts. Setting up clinics near high schools was an effective tactic. She even planned to set up a clinic by a mall so customers could go shopping while waiting for their abortion. Says Everett: “Greed – the love of money and the things I could have with it – blinded me. [I was] an abortionist who used whatever means available to get a woman to have an abortion for the sake of money.”

This insatiable lust for money resulted in abortions being performed on women who were not even pregnant! Indeed, the temptation was to get every woman who came into the clinic to have an abortion. Says Everett: “Do you think an abortionist who works on a straight commission is going to tell a woman who has signed her consent form and has already paid in full that she is not pregnant?”

–Abortion is a safe and harmless operation. False. It is not safe for the mothers, and it is certainly not safe for the baby. A rash of injuries and deaths occurred in her clinics. In one instance a doctor perforated a fifteen-year-old girl’s uterus and had pulled her colon through her vagina. A thirty-two-year-old Mexican woman also had her uterus perforated, with a forceps severing her urinary tract. One woman had the head of her fifteen-week-old baby pushed into her abdomen. These patients were rushed to hospital, and elaborate cover-ups were implemented. As Everett learned early on in the abortion business, a “successful abortion clinic needs doctors willing to put their licence on the line in the cover-up of botched abortions, in order to keep families from filing lawsuits.”

Deaths of patients were inevitable, since Everett was willing to do abortions on very late pregnancies. She even performed abortions on women as late as twenty-five weeks. In fact it was the death of a girl twenty-weeks pregnant which led to Everett’s eventual conversion to Christianity and her resignation from the abortion business. The girl’s story is worth recounting in detail.

Sheryl, like most young girls, was scared and naive. The clinic staff did their best to convince her to have an abortion. Said Everett to the girl, “I must stress the urgency, because the price keeps going up each week you wait. The charge at twenty-four weeks is seven hundred and fifty dollars rather than five hundred. You need to find the money as quickly as you can.” Sheryl succumbed to the pressure and managed to find the money.

The doctor soon had most parts of the baby out of the womb. “The head, the largest part of the baby’s body, is usually the last part to come out. The head must be crushed before it can pass through the cervix. Usually the head is deflated first by suctioning out the brain and all the other contents ” As the heads of babies were crushed manually, the doctor joked of getting tennis-elbow from this technique.

The operation was now over, although it was performed hastily, as “recovery room nurses were not cheap” and Everett had a date planned for later that night. While cleaning up, Everett was told to come to the recovery room. Sheryl had passed a clot, and blood was splashed everywhere, on the bed, the curtains and the walls. The doctor, also in a hurry for a date, had the nurses slow down the bleeding. Although her blood pressure was low, the doctor instructed the nurses to dismiss the patient when her vital signs had stabilised. He did not stay to give her another pelvic examination to determine the source of bleeding.

At six the next morning the doctor called Everett to tell her that Sheryl was dead.

Sheryl’s death and the deaths of a number of other women at Everett’s clinics finally resulted in her renunciation of the abortion industry and her embracing Christianity. The Scarlet Lady is a powerful book about one of the twentieth century’s greatest evils, and about one woman’s involvement with it. Buy this book and buy one for a friend.

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